


Scientific Proof

by sinistra_blache



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Angry Hux, Basically nothing new there, I know more about useless Star Wars canon minutia than genetic sequencing, M/M, Smug Kylo Ren, There's no anything, There's no kissing, They just really hate each other and it's great, so get ready for that, trigger warning: Midichlorians
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-01
Updated: 2016-05-01
Packaged: 2018-06-05 13:33:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6706363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinistra_blache/pseuds/sinistra_blache
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>General Hux is a man of science. Kylo Ren is, at the end of the rotation, a man of faith.<br/>Faith doesn't usually trump science and Hux doesn't think it's fair that it should get a chance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Scientific Proof

Sleep was for the weak. 

Hux’s father had always said that, usually when Hux would find him still poring over old Imperial maps or when he had woken Hux up to tell him another story of Imperial glory. 

_Sleep is for the weak, son._

_Yes, Commandant._

Hux knew he would one day grow up to rule the galaxy, like the great Emperor Palpatine, and rulers of the galaxy were anything but weak. 

He hadn’t slept for more than four hours in the last two or three day cycles. He had programmed his food dispenser to produce a food paste, grey and devoid of any real flavor, to have more stimulants than was strictly regulation but it kept him awake and productive. It kept him sharp when his body threatened to betray him into weakness. He’d sleep when he was finished. He’d sleep when he was dead. 

Hux would be the ruler of the galaxy well before he was dead. 

He was, very technically, relaxing while the rest of the ship was in the middle of its night cycle. He had an unopened container of his nutrient paste on the desk in front of him and another in his hand while he watched the numbers tick by on the holocaster screen right above his desk. 

He sipped at the paste and his lip curled in distaste. The numbers in front of him, more so than the bland paste in his mouth, had curdled his already rotten mood. They didn’t make sense. If there was one thing he could count on in the galaxy, it was that numbers eventually made sense. These numbers had no business being confusing. He was never confused and especially not by numbers. 

The blue visual representation of a DNA strand rotated beside the traitorous numbers. It’s slow movement could have been relaxing if it weren’t a clear source of frustration. DNA could be broken down into numbers. Humans, even non-human scum, could always be broken down into numbers. Life itself was an equation, a problem, a solution. The drop of blood and strand of hair that Hux had taken should have given him something to work with. It could have even given him a new problem to solve. But it did nothing of the sort. He snorted, ungraceful, at the ghostly spiral and took another sip. 

He should have known that Kylo Ren would provide yet another way to make Hux practically vibrate with quiet rage. The man was infuriating. Of course his blood was equally as infuriating. 

Hux glanced at his quarters’ lights. Still the middle of the night cycle; the lights were dimmed but not out and his bedside lamps were as bright as they could get to help him see. He was reasonably confident that if he left now then he would find Supreme Leader’s maddening golden boy. Refusing to lose hours of work to sleep was one thing that they had in common, as it went. Hux finished his open container of paste, coming to a decision, and grabbed the holosphere with the results before leaving his quarters. 

The longer it took him to find Kylo Ren, the more angry Hux became. What made his frustration spike even further, somehow, was that when he found Ren he was just sitting at one of the command consoles very quietly going over the old records they had stolen from the Jedi Temple. Again. 

“General Hux,” Ren greeted him in a monotone, bored voice without looking up. Hux bristled. He hadn’t even opened his mouth to let Ren know he was there. Hux _hated it_ when he did that. 

“Ren,” Hux started, forcing calm into his voice. Kylo tilted his helmet towards Hux, just to his left, but otherwise didn’t stop reading and scrolling through the records. “I want to go over some findings with you.” 

“That’s unusual,” Ren answered in the same tone. “Whenever I try to engage with your experiments you get very territorial.” 

Hux could feel a sneer form but he could do nothing to stop it. How dare he describe Hux, a recognised General of a great and powerful army, like an animal pissing against a plant? Kylo finally turned to face him, though of course the helmet was impossible to read. “I am not asking for a partner in my project. That would be quite laughable, since you are the subject.” 

He had not meant to say that. He had to let the man know that he had been trying to isolate the gene that granted him so much control over people's minds and bodies, what he and Supreme Leader ridiculously dubbed The Force. Even Hux couldn’t ignore that it was a real thing that Kylo Ren did. He has personally watched Ren lift his men into the air, intimidating and effortless, without touching them. It happened. But there had to be _reason_ behind it. There had to be a _solution_. He was going to tell Kylo that, but not in the manner he just did. That was an embarrassing slip. 

He did not betray any surprise or embarrassment, schooling his face into what he hoped was a simple mask of contempt. 

Ren, now, had swivelled in his chair to face Hux properly. He didn’t speak for a moment, instead looking up at where Hux was standing, quietly considering the words he had just spoken. 

“You’re trying to understand The Force,” Ren guessed. He had to have guessed. Kylo Ren’s apparent mind reading, General Hux decided a long time ago, was due to him being very adept at reading body language and micro-expressions. It was a well-known way of controlling a situation. Hux had, when he was younger, tried to learn how to do it himself. It turned out to be too much of an emotion-based skill for him to pick up easily and he had quickly moved on. 

“And if I was?” 

“Then I would be very interested in knowing what you found and why you need me,” Ren answered, lifting a shoulder. Usually Ren was a powder keg of rage and barely concealed childish reactions to not getting his way. It bothered Hux that he was so calm. Of course the man continued to be infuriating even when he wasn’t being his usual infuriating self. 

Hux held back a frustrated sigh and reached across Ren to insert the holosphere into the console. The Jedi archives promptly disappeared and showed the same confusing numbers and slowly rotating strand of DNA, continuing to mock Hux even now. 

“What is this?” Ren asked. 

“This is you,” Hux replied. “This is a strand of your DNA, a map to your genetics, a representation of your past and future failings, your potential.” 

Ren made a thoughtful noise and leaned forward, examining the strand closer. Hux rolled his eyes. There was no way that Ren could possibly make sense of it without it all being explained to him. There was no sense in getting closer, as though it would suddenly make sense to him. Hux didn’t need Kylo to _understand_ what Hux was looking at. He needed Kylo to explain what he couldn’t find. 

He pressed a button on the console, opening up a different screen next to the one with Kylo’s DNA slowly spiralling. It brought up Hux’s own sequence, a sequence which made sense. 

Kylo looked at that, turning his head reluctantly away from his own representation. “General. I am waiting for you to get to your point.” 

Hux ground his teeth before he replied. “ _This_ is my DNA. _That_ is yours,” he pointed at them both as though he were talking to a particularly dense child. 

“There is no difference,” Kylo Ren observed. Idiot. 

“That is untrue.” 

“That is what I am seeing, General.” 

“And _that_ is hardly my concern. Just because you cannot see the differences doesn’t mean they are the same. I, for instance, do not have a genetic history of developing melancytic nevi.”

“Get to your point, General,” Ren prompted. His synthesised voice was finally starting to show some of its characteristic anger. Hux felt better. Perhaps now Ren was feeling like the idiot he truly was.

“My point, Ren, is that I should be able to see something in your DNA that I do not recognise from my own,” he explained. “I should not be able to pick out every single known marker within your DNA and not be left with something that _should_ be the secret behind your...abilities.” Hux was unable to keep the scepticism out of his voice. 

Kylo took a breath and began to move, and Hux jumped back from him. He instinctively knew not to be close to Kylo if he had pushed him too far towards genuine anger. As it turns out, Ren was just reaching to press a button on the console. Hux did absolutely did not flush with embarrassment due to his obvious paranoia, his obvious fear of what Ren could do to him. 

Ren had brought the Jedi archives back up. Hux’s own project disappeared, replaced. He fumed silently and took a quick moment to calm himself before he spoke. “I was not finished.” 

“I am aware of that, General,” Kylo replied, scrolling quickly through the archives and otherwise ignoring Hux. 

“Kylo,” Hux demanded, his frustration getting the better of him. “Bring my project back up this instant. You cannot just stop a conversation in the middle of it because you are not grasping what it is about.” 

“Shut. Up,” Kylo’s synthesiser made his words pop as he enunciated dangerously. He pointed at a portion of the archives on the holocaster. “Midichlorians.” 

Hux looked at the passage that Ren was pointing at. It certainly held that nonsense word. It didn’t reveal any information, however. It didn’t explain what Ren was getting at. 

“Jedi nonsense?” Hux drawled in response. Kylo inclined his head slightly. 

“The source of one’s control over The Force, as it happens,” he told Hux. He spoke in the same slow, patient, pointed tone that Hux had spoken in when he was explaining DNA. 

“I have never heard of such a thing.” 

“These are lost archives, General.” 

Hux gave the side of Ren’s helmet a withering look. “It doesn’t matter. Science can’t just be _lost_. I would have heard about whatever this is.” 

Kylo sat back in his chair and looked up at Hux. “You can ask what they are.” 

Hux flushed with a mix of anger and embarrassment. His dislike of Ren’s arrogance kept him awake at night, when his work didn’t. “I know that.” 

“But you won’t.”

“Don’t tell me what I will or will not do, Ren!” Hux exploded. The sound echoed in the empty control room. He was very glad that there hadn’t even been a passing maintenance trooper anywhere around to hear or witness that outburst. He huffed a breath, smoothing his hair back into place where it had fallen. He still couldn’t read Kylo’s stupid helmet but he got a creeping feeling that he was smiling. “What are they.” 

“They’re beings who live in our blood.” 

Hux blinked at Ren, dumbfounded. Ren waited. 

“If you’re not going to take this seriously then I will not entertain you any further.” 

“I am being very serious, General.”

Hux blinked again. His brain was having trouble dumbing down to this level. It was going very slowly, almost coming to a stubborn and screeching halt, as it was forced to comprehend how a grown man could believe such rubbish.

“Beings,” Hux echoed slowly. “Who live in our blood.” 

“Yes.” 

“And they give you magical powers?” 

Ren sighed and turned back to the archives, scrolling past the passage about the magical creatures who resided in his blood that made him special. “If you’re not going to take this seriously then I will not entertain you any further.” 

“You’re so childish.” 

“Yet so right,” Ren countered. “That must be a burden on you.”

“I hate you so much,” Hux seethed, grabbing his holosphere out of the console. He had nearly managed to storm out but Kylo Ren’s damned voice called back to him. 

“I’ll show you,” he offered as though it meant nothing to him either way. “I’ll even donate blood.” 

Hux stopped, mid-storming, and turned on his heel. “To what end?”

“I will prove to you that midichorlians and, therefore, The Force is real,” Kylo steepled his fingers in front of his face. 

Hux chuckled. That was exactly the same as Kylo offering to show him that his imaginary friend was real. “And if you cannot prove this?”

Kylo shrugged and stood quickly. “Not a possibility. But, if it makes you feel better, if that comes up then you can choose the terms. Is that sufficient, General?”

There was nothing Kylo Ren could do that would soothe how offended Hux felt whenever he heard ‘General’ through that helmet’s voice. It constantly sounded like a veiled insult, a joke that Hux wasn’t sure he ever heard. His sneer returned. 

“That will do, Ren,” he decides. He’ll take his time coming up with his prize after his victory over Kylo’s ridiculous devotion to ancient mysticism. “I have everything we need in my quarters.” 

“Lead the way.” 

Hux rolled his eyes. As if Ren didn’t know where his quarters were. He didn’t say anything because there would be no point in starting an endless bickering war, but Hux really wanted to call him childish again. Not that it did much good the first time. Or the second time. Or the time minutes ago. 

They walked in silence to Hux’s rooms. Once inside, Hux sat at his desk and started looking around for an unopened needle. If Ren ended up with an infection he’d never hear the end of it. 

He didn’t even notice that Kylo had sat down across from him until he saw the movement out of the corner of his eye. The telltale hiss shocked Hux. 

“What are you doing?” he yelped. He hated that he actually yelped, but it couldn’t be stopped. 

Kylo placed the helmet on the desk between them with a surprisingly heavy ‘thunk’. He started to unbutton the top of his shirt. “I can’t roll up my sleeves,” he explained. The wound across the right side of his face still hadn’t healed completely, even though he spent weeks in the healing tanks after the destruction of Starkiller Base. It was grim. Hux tried to tear his gaze away from it but he just sat there, staring. Staring and silent. Kylo raised his eyebrow, which looked like it should have been painful, and continued to take his top off. “They’re too tight. I’d only get to the top of my wrists.” 

“That would have done,” Hux remembered to reply at the last second. “I can draw blood from your wrists.” 

“I was under the impression that you liked to do thing the correct way,” Kylo said. Somehow his sarcastic tone was made worse by the loss of his synthesiser. He shrugged off the top layer of his clothes and Hux’s eyes darted to the other wound, right on his shoulder, that Hux expected to be healed as well. It wasn’t. It should be. 

“Why aren’t you healed yet?” he asked, choosing the worst question out of multitudes of better ones because his brain refused to listen to him any longer. He needed another container of his nutrient paste, maybe. Lack of sleep was getting to him. 

Kylo paused and looked at Hux in the eye. “Power comes from pain, General,” he said simply. Hux decided not to pursue that further. The Supreme Leader was clearly working a psychological control angle on Kylo and Hux didn’t want to get in the way of that, but that didn’t stop him from thinking that Kylo sounded insane. 

“If you like,” he said instead, going back to looking for a suitable needle. 

“I will never understand why you ask questions when you don’t want the answer,” Kylo sighed. Hux ignored him. He opened a different drawer. “You’re obsessed with finding out about The Force but you’re never willing to accept the truth when it’s presented.” 

“Your truth is not the same as my truth, Ren,” Hux muttered, finally finding a needle and taking it out of the packaging. “Come here and give me your arm.” 

Wordlessly, Ren moved his chair closer to Hux. It was easier to see the damage to his face and shoulder now. His face just looked painful, nearly fresh and glistening. The wound on his shoulder had clearly been reopened a few times. The rest of his upper body was untouched, though decidedly underfed. Perhaps his dependence on his abilities has left Kylo’s muscles unused. Hux would have to consider offering some nutrition paste; it wouldn’t create muscles from nothing but it would certainly make Kylo more healthy. He was supposed to be the right hand of Supreme Leader Snoke. He couldn’t look like he weighed 80 pounds when wet. 

“What are you going to do?” Kylo watched Hux’s hands as he put on some gloves and found the vein.

“What you offered, Ren,” Hux sighed, cleaning the area quickly. “I’m going to take some of your blood and then we’re going to look for your magical little friends who live in there.” To Kylo’s credit, he didn’t flinch when Hux inserted the needle. He watched with fascination while the blood flowed quickly into the tube. 

“You said that you could see certain things within my genetics,” Kylo prompted. Hux put one tube of blood aside and chose to fill another. Just in case. He wasn’t going to waste an opportunity like this. “What things, specifically, could you see?”

“Nothing special,” Hux replied, perhaps unkindly. “Some odd markers for heat-adaptation. Were you born on a desert planet?”

“No.”

“Someone in your family was,” Hux told him, finishing up. He pressed a cloth to Kylo’s arm and lifted it, indicating that he should keep it there. Hux considered the tubes of blood on his desk. “How do you propose we look for those things?”

“Midichlorians,” Ren told him. “There are ways. The archives hold a method, it would be quite simple to extract it.” 

“By all means, let’s rely on ancient technology to prove your ridiculous theory,” Hux waved his hand. He took off his gloves, letting them snap to indicate his distaste for the situation. “How long will you be?”

“Sit there, stop complaining,” Kylo snapped, frowning. Hux finally had a facial expression to put to that annoyed tone of voice he heard so often. He went to Hux’s console without even asking and loaded up the stupid Jedi archives there, working them one-handed. “I can isolate the technology they used back then. It says here they would be able to do it remotely, but we don’t have the apparatus.”

“Fascinating,” Hux replied sarcastically, leaning back in his chair and looking at one of the tubes. It was still warm in his hand. It should have made him feel sick. Kylo’s wounds should make him feel sick. 

“Don’t be petty, General,” Kylo complained blandly. He clicked his fingers, not looking at Hux. “Bring the blood to your station. I’ll load up the technology.” 

“This had better not infect my software, Ren,” Hux warned, flushing slightly when Kylo clicked his fingers and Hux actually moved to where he was told. “I would like to see you try to explain to the Supreme Leader why my work station is overloaded with out-dated Jedi rubbish.” 

“I’m sure he would applaud my attempts to educate you in the ways of The Force,” Kylo replied, standing to bring his transfered software to the station. Hux’s face twisted slightly at the sight of Kylo’s skinny chest bending then straightening in the movement. If Kylo takes the nutrition paste then Hux will see if he can schedule him some physical training time on top of it. They both sat at the station, as it was big enough for the two of them to do so, and worked quietly on their different tasks.

“I will have to take some of my own blood,” Hux said, breaking the quiet. It was approaching something of a companionable silence. For some reason that he would never be able to put his finger on, Hux didn’t want the silence to be comfortable. 

“Will that be necessary, General?”

“I would like something to compare the findings to. At least I know that I don’t have any perceived powers,” Hux replied with a barely concealed scoff. 

“You certainly do not,” Kylo said under his breath but still audible. Hux glared at him. Kylo met his gaze lazily. Hux almost missed the unreadable helmet. It didn’t look half as smug or punchable as Kylo’s actual face did. “Do it, then. I’m finished here.” 

“Fine,” Hux spat. He still had needles in the packet he found earlier. He hated taking his own blood but it was a step he had to take. Weakness, he reminded himself, was not an option for him. He didn’t take half as much blood from himself as he did from Kylo, but he had a lower blood pressure and the act alone was making him feel unwell. He’d be damned if he got sick in front of Ren. He would never live it down. “I’m done. Let’s get this over with. I would like to get working on thinking about what you’ll owe me when you find out that you’re wrong.” 

“Your arrogance is one of your greatest weaknesses,” Kylo accused quietly through his teeth, meeting Hux’s eyes again without blinking. It made Hux feel uncomfortable but he didn’t break the gaze. Whatever Ren said, he was not weak. 

“You don’t know anything about me or my perceived arrogance, Ren,” Hux growled, sitting back down at the station. “Don’t speak of things you know nothing about. It makes you sound like an idiot.” 

“I assure you, General, I am not the one who is going to sound like an idiot by the end of the night,” Kylo replied. Hux was really starting to hate how he enunciated his words. Another peeve to add to the long list titled ‘Kylo Ren’ in Hux’s mind. The sheer gall of the boy beside him accusing him of being arrogant as he sits there, still topless and emaciated as though it was nothing to be ashamed of, clinging to ancient religious dogma as though it were the only thing in the whole galaxy and refusing to listen to any alternatives.

Hux labelled the tubes of blood, fuming so much that his handwriting ended up a scrawl, then handed them to Kylo. “Get on with it, Ren.” 

Kylo smirked. “As you wish,” he said in a teasing sort of tone, taking the tubes and placing them in the station’s console. 

The technology used by the Jedi, as far as Hux could tell from the initial results coming up on screen in front of them, was not so far removed from his own. He was very close to tempted to tell Kylo to leave the tech’s code behind so that he could have a look. 

Oddly familiar symbols ticked by in front of them. Kylo watched them with no hint of confusion on his face. “Can you read that?” Hux asked, pointing.

Kylo nodded. “It looks like it could be written in Aurebesh, but it doesn’t make any sense to me.” 

“It is a hybrid of the Aurebesh and some Jedi pictograms,” Kylo explained, looking at Hux sideways and sounding put out. Hux bristled. He sounded like he was a breath away from ending his sentences in ‘obviously’. “I have no real clue as to why they wrote that way. They didn’t do it all the time. Perhaps it was a way to keep their secrets? Pointless. The Jedi did a lot of pointless things.”

“So the Supreme Leader taught you Jedi pictograms,” Hux muttered, piecing together his information. He often wondered when the Supreme Leader had time to train and teach Kylo bloody Ren. 

“No,” was all that Kylo said to that. “It’s done. I’ll run the translation program before I make a fool of you.” 

“Keep your ridiculous hopes to yourself, Ren,” Hux sneered in response. “You’ll be eating your words soon enough when I——”

The screen showed their names, next to each other. It had sequenced their DNA and both sequences where right beside their names. There were numbers under their names. Neither numbers were low, as far as numbers went. But one was significantly higher than the other. There was other information there, and Hux would no doubt look at that later, but for now he could only focus on one pair of numbers. 

Kylo Ren: 19,700  
General Hux: 2,000

“That is quite an impressive number for someone who isn’t sensitive to The Force, General,” Ren spoke, acting as though Hux hadn’t just been threatening to feed his gloating words to him moments ago. He wasn’t smiling, nor was his tone of voice particularly teasing. But his eyebrow on the wounded side was raised. Accusing. Mocking.

“Shut up,” Hux said. He felt like he wasn’t even there. He felt as though he were speaking through a thick fog of failure and anger.

“You’re not the only one who is disappointed,” Kylo said, looking back to the figures and frowning. “I was expecting a higher number for myself. A lower number for you.”

“Those numbers don’t mean anything!” Hux yelled. He sounded loud even to his own ears but he couldn’t control it. “You could have programmed it to say anything!”

“I couldn’t.”

“Those could be the result of a different test!”

“What kind of test?”

“Shut up. Run it again.” 

“To what end, General? To see the same numbers? So that you can feel nauseas at another bout of bloodletting? You lost the wager,” Ren said slowly, quietly. Triumphantly. Now he smiled and it was all teeth with no joy. “Learn to gamble correctly in the future.” 

“I told you to shut up,” Hux snapped, getting up. He walked over to his desk where Ren had left his clothes, then threw them at the show-off mystic with apparently very high scores in idiotic tests. “Get out of my quarters.” 

“I won the wager, General,” Kylo said, then pulled the top of his outfit on. Was it a uniform? He barely wore anything else. “And there is a price to pay, if you recall.” 

“Get out,” Hux repeated, shaking with undefined rage. He had no idea why this was affecting him so badly. Perhaps he did need to sleep after all. Perhaps he just needed an hour, it might settle his mood. He picked up the helmet, heavier than it looked, and handed it to Ren as he walked by the desk and out the door. 

“I’ll collect once you’ve come to terms with your defeat,” Ren said over his shoulder before putting his helmet back on. He lifted his hood and left the room, the door hissing to a close behind him. The lights in Hux’s quarters when back to its dim night-cycle levels, as he usually had it when he didn’t have company. The only light came from the single lamp by his bed and the slowly rotating strands of DNA, side by side, next to some numbers.

He didn’t know how to feel. Numbers had never betrayed Hux before.


End file.
